Actian Snags ParAccel for Big Data Management, Analytics

Redwood City, Calif.-based Actian, a Big Data management company, announced today that it had acquired ParAccel, an analytics database company that specializes in massively parallel processing. One of ParAccel's major claims to fame is that its technology powers, in part, Amazon's Redshift, the cloud giant's data analytics product.

For now, the companies are keeping the deal's terms under wraps.

Actian is one of a growing number of software providers that want to bring the power of Big Data analytics to midsized firms -- a big and potentially lucrative market, but one that typically lacks the IT expertise and budgets of large enterprises.

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"Mid-market organizations and workgroups have business challenges that require enterprise-class technology. Yet they don't have enterprise-sized resources for projects, especially uncertain ones," stated Actian CEO Steve Shine in company remarks during the launch of the company's Vectorwise Workgroup Edition offering earlier this year.

The technology runs on modest servers, but more crucially, it also eliminates much of the IT complexity that surrounds enterprise-grade solutions. It's a theme that carries through today's announcement.

"Today's software will fail to cope with complexities of Big Data. The Actian software portfolio, which is specifically designed to fully exploit modern hardware architectures, arms organizations with an unmatched single platform to connect to any data, analyze it at scale for relevance and take action to turn big data into business value," said Shine in a statement.

Bringing ParAccel's Big Data analytics technology into the fold extends Actian's platform into the realm of large scale analytics while maintaining an integrated approach. The Bloor Group chief analyst and co-founder Robin Bloor noted that the deal practically turns Actian into a one-stop provider of Big Data business solutions.

"Actian is building a modern, highly innovative end-to-end database, integration and analytics solution aimed squarely at solving today's growing data challenges. With the ability to capture, ingest, analyze and take action on data at scale, Actian is now very powerfully positioned in the big data and data analytics markets," offered Bloor in a statement.

For Actian, snapping up Campbell, Calif.-based ParAccel also brings some new, big customers into the fold.

"ParAccel is being used by many of the world's leading companies including Amazon, The Royal Bank of Scotland, OfficeMax and MicroStrategy to set them apart from their competition through analytics. With Actian, they have immediate access to a broader portfolio of solutions to turn their data into value," remarked ParAccel CEO Chuck Berger in press remarks.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Enterprise Apps Today and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter@ecoINSITE.